A hierarchical solution approach for a multicommodity distribution problem under a special cost structure

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Motivated by the spare parts distribution system of a major automotive manufacturer in Turkey, we consider a multicommodity distribution problem from a central depot to a number of geographically dispersed demand points. The distribution of the items is carried out by a set of identical vehicles. The demand of each demand point can be satisfied by several vehicles and a single vehicle is allowed to serve multiple demand points. For a given vehicle, the cost structure is dictated by the farthest demand point from the depot among all demand points served by that vehicle. The objective is to satisfy the demand of each demand point with the minimum total distribution cost. We present a novel integer linear programming formulation of the problem as a variant of the network design problem. The resulting optimization problem becomes computationally infeasible for real-life problems due to the large number of integer variables. In an attempt to circumvent this disadvantage of using the direct formulation especially for larger problems, we propose a Hierarchical Approach that is aimed at solving the problem in two stages using partial demand aggregation followed by a disaggregation scheme. We study the properties of the solution returned by the Hierarchical Approach. We perform computational studies on a data set adapted from a major automotive manufacturer in Turkey. Our results reveal that the Hierarchical Approach significantly outperforms the direct formulation approach in terms of both the running time and the quality of the resulting solution especially on large instances. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

A new perspective on the complexity of interior point methods for linear programming

In a dynamical systems paradigm, many optimization algorithms are equivalent to applying forward Euler method to the system of ordinary differential equations defined by the vector field of the search directions. Thus the stiffness of such vector fields will play an essential role in the complexity of these methods. We first exemplify this point with a theoretical result for general linesearch methods for unconstrained optimization, which we further employ to investigating the complexity of a primal short-step path-following interior point method for linear programming. Our analysis involves showing that the Newton vector field associated to the primal logarithmic barrier is nonstiff in a sufficiently small and shrinking neighbourhood of its minimizer. Thus, by confining the iterates to these neighbourhoods of the primal central path, our algorithm has a nonstiff vector field of search directions, and we can give a worst-case bound on its iteration complexity. Furthermore, due to the generality of our vector field setting, we can perform a similar (global) iteration complexity analysis when the Newton direction of the interior point method is computed only approximately, using some direct method for solving linear systems of equations

Finding a point in the relative interior of a polyhedron

A new initialization or `Phase I' strategy for feasible interior point methods for linear programming is proposed that computes a point on the primal-dual central path associated with the linear program. Provided there exist primal-dual strictly feasible points - an all-pervasive assumption in interior point method theory that implies the existence of the central path - our initial method (Algorithm 1) is globally Q-linearly and asymptotically Q-quadratically convergent, with a provable worst-case iteration complexity bound. When this assumption is not met, the numerical behaviour of Algorithm 1 is highly disappointing, even when the problem is primal-dual feasible. This is due to the presence of implicit equalities, inequality constraints that hold as equalities at all the feasible points. Controlled perturbations of the inequality constraints of the primal-dual problems are introduced - geometrically equivalent to enlarging the primal-dual feasible region and then systematically contracting it back to its initial shape - in order for the perturbed problems to satisfy the assumption. Thus Algorithm 1 can successfully be employed to solve each of the perturbed problems.\ud We show that, when there exist primal-dual strictly feasible points of the original problems, the resulting method, Algorithm 2, finds such a point in a finite number of changes to the perturbation parameters. When implicit equalities are present, but the original problem and its dual are feasible, Algorithm 2 asymptotically detects all the primal-dual implicit equalities and generates a point in the relative interior of the primal-dual feasible set. Algorithm 2 can also asymptotically detect primal-dual infeasibility. Successful numerical experience with Algorithm 2 on linear programs from NETLIB and CUTEr, both with and without any significant preprocessing of the problems, indicates that Algorithm 2 may be used as an algorithmic preprocessor for removing implicit equalities, with theoretical guarantees of convergence

Probabilistic Constraint Logic Programming

This paper addresses two central problems for probabilistic processing models: parameter estimation from incomplete data and efficient retrieval of most probable analyses. These questions have been answered satisfactorily only for probabilistic regular and context-free models. We address these problems for a more expressive probabilistic constraint logic programming model. We present a log-linear probability model for probabilistic constraint logic programming. On top of this model we define an algorithm to estimate the parameters and to select the properties of log-linear models from incomplete data. This algorithm is an extension of the improved iterative scaling algorithm of Della-Pietra, Della-Pietra, and Lafferty (1995). Our algorithm applies to log-linear models in general and is accompanied with suitable approximation methods when applied to large data spaces. Furthermore, we present an approach for searching for most probable analyses of the probabilistic constraint logic programming model. This method can be applied to the ambiguity resolution problem in natural language processing applications.Comment: 35 pages, uses sfbart.cl